It’s a Russian project, which some people are suspicious of because Russia has leveraged open source projects for less-than-honest purposes in the past.
It’s managed by a for-profit company to sell their server software, which is generally approached with a big grain of salt in the FOSS community.
They preference OOXML files rather than ODF files by default, which some users (notably the document foundation) consider the more poorly-defined open standard, which benefits Microsoft (who mostly developed the OOXML format). This is some complicated inside baseball and the fork does not seem to be swayed by it—they’ll continue to preference OOXML.
OnlyOffice has contribution practices which are sometimes hostile to the FOSS ethos. The maintainers are not as transparent as most projects, they generally prefer to fix issues in-house rather than collaborate with a broader community on pull requests.
I still use it. Here’s why: I don’t think it’s very good ethics to be suspicious of an entire nationality; the code is open, so what are you afraid of? I guess it’s possible to sneak something malicious into a binary blob, but that borders on paranoia. I’ve personally found the team to be very responsive. When I have brought up issues with the function or design, they have been good partners and been clear in their actions. YMMV
FOSS only thrives because of public-private partnerships; I believe we should reward companies that offer open source code, even when they may not comply with some grand FOSS philosophy. I don’t like purity tests.
OOXML has, for better or worse, become the global document standard. Instead of lamenting it, we should be working to make it the best we can.
Basically, OnlyOffice works for me in a number of ways that LibreOffice doesn’t. I’m not interested in server-based document sharing, but I am interested in good design and mobile support. This fork is only focused on the server software, so I won’t be switching at this time.
Nope. It’s always safe to ignore any articles about “kids these days”